Coal bites the dust in Germany, Europe's greenest nation

London: A leading mainstream politician in a major industrial nation this week said the country will phase out coal power, completely, in less than two decades' time.

Imagine the blowback if an Australian politician - Labor or Liberal - tried that.

A coal miner in traditional dress wipes a tear during the closing ceremony of the last German coal mine in Bottrop, Germany, in December.Credit:AP

But this is not the first time German Chancellor Angela Merkel has pulled a stunt like this. In 2011, a few months after Japan's Fukushima disaster, she abruptly ordered the shutdown of almost half the country’s 27 nuclear reactors and set a timeline to take the rest offline by 2022.

The loudest protests came from people who thought that wasn’t fast enough.

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This week some muttered about higher energy prices and energy security concerns over Merkel’s 2038 coal phase-out decision. But just as loud were complaints that it could all be done a decade faster if the government really put its mind to it.

It’s not just in policy, but in politics too. Last year regional elections in Bavaria and Hesse, home to BMW and Deutsche Bank respectively, saw best-ever results for the Green Party. They are currently polling just a smidgen under 20 per cent in national surveys, second only to Angela Merkel’s centre-right Christian Democrats (CDU).

Something is happening. But what, and why, and why now? Why, of all places, is Germany so green?

“Coal was like gold,” recalls Friedbert Meurer, a correspondent for German national public radio and a child of Germany’s postwar industrial boom, known as the Wirtschaftswunder, the Miracle on the Rhine.

“Lorries full of coal, trains full of coal were a symbol of the Wirtschaftswunder. The rise of Germany after the war and in the '50s and '60s was strongly linked to coal mining. Coal was the energy to boost modern Germany, to make Germany successful again.

“In the '50s and '60s, and even '70s and '80s, that would have been unthinkable - to say ‘let’s phase out the coal industry’.”

Snow on an abandoned coal mining dump in Gelsenkirchen, Germany.Credit:AP

But in the 1990s, things began to change.

“Germans have started to feel uncomfortable with coal,” says Meurer. “It’s a little bit weird because the Germans rely so very much on their industry sector - but they don’t like it. It’s dirty, it pollutes the environment.”

He remembers the first Greens to enter parliament. They were, frankly, hippies. They arrived wearing jeans, carrying sunflowers in pots. They were ridiculed.

But they married their environmentalism with pacifism, a movement with extra resonance in Germany, not just because of the war but also the knowledge that the country could have become a nuclear battleground at the height of the Cold War. They opposed the Iraq war, a move that garnered respect.

Protesters calling for an end to coal in 2017.Credit:EPA

Figures like Joschka Fischer, a popular, politically canny and endearingly outspoken Green who served as foreign minister and vice-chancellor in the cabinet of Gerhard Schroeder, helped move his party into the political mainstream. The sneakers he wore to his swearing-in are now in a museum.

The Greens were even in power, in coalition with the Social Democrats (SPD), in North Rhine-Westphalia, the heart of the coal and steel industry. There were arguments over coal. At the time the Social Democrats, many of whose members came from the industrial working class, resisted the Greens’ moves to change the agenda.

But the clock was ticking. In 1990 there were 115,000 employees in the brown coal sector of reunited Germany. Now there are only 20,000. And there are 330,000 workers in renewables.

“Workers and their families are voters,” says Meurer.

Angela Merkel, he says, has a very important skill: “She knows exactly when the time is ripe.”

German Chancellor Angela Merkel 'knows when the time is ripe'.Credit:AP

She picked the right time to phase out nuclear energy, he says, and now she knows it is not dangerous (for her own party, at least) to phase out coal power.

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It’s not necessarily inspired, conscience-driven politics, says Matthias Dilling, a lecturer at Oxford University who specialises in European party politics. It’s a political calculation.

He points out that at the time of Merkel’s decision on nuclear power, her CDU had been shocked by a defeat in the big south-western state of Baden-Wuerttemberg, which it had controlled for decades. There, instead, the Greens formed a coalition with the Social Democrats. A Green became the state’s new minister-president.

By counter-punching onto Green policy territory, Merkel helped staunch the wound. Her party recovered votes and the Greens lost their momentum. The CDU didn’t exactly own the “energy transfer” policy, but at least they were not seen as its opponents.

And this idea of energy transfer - that a switch to renewables was a matter of time rather than still up for debate - was slowly becoming the norm.

Meurer has a theory: it’s because of Germany’s history.

“We want to be the good guy,” he says. “The whole green movement was a kind of reaction, in a certain way, to the behaviour of our fathers and grandfathers. We wanted to be better. There is a strong link between the past and what’s going on now. To be better, to behave better.”

Thousands of people march in Berlin in December to demand that Germany make a quick exit from coal-fired energy.Credit:AP

It’s the same reason Germany made such a point of accepting Syrian refugees, he says: “We want to present ourselves to the world as people who have changed their mind.”

Dilling, though, disputes this.

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“I think this might be wishful thinking,” he says. He points out the weakness of the Greens in the old East Germany.

Certainly the idea of transnationalism, the idea that Germany can only prosper by working with its neighbours and on the global stage, is a long tradition and trajectory for German politics. This boosts the acceptability of Green plans and dilutes opposition to global climate pacts.

Dilling says there may be something to an alternative "post-materialist" explanation, the idea that as a country develops economically people move past their basic material needs and start embracing post-material needs such as environmental action. There is some evidence for this: the inter-generational differences, where young people are more environmentally aware.

But, says Dilling, “what is behind the rise of the Greens now has a pretty plain political explanation”.

Basically, people are fed up with the "grand coalition" [of the CDU and the SPD] running the country.

“It’s a good time not to be one of the two major parties,” he says. “Grand coalitions at a federal level have always been seen as the exception … given the timing of the rise of the Greens it really has to do with dissatisfaction with this type of coalition.”

Meurer says the next testing ground for Green Germany is the car industry. It’s an industrial behemoth, rich and powerful, its lobbyists deeply embedded in the political system. There’s BMW in Munich, Audi in Ingolstadt, Porsche and Mercedes Benz in Stuttgart.

Greens hate them all. They dream of bicycle-centred cities, of clean air.

“But Angela Merkel knows she can’t do with the car industry what she does with the coal industry,” says Meurer. “It is too important, too many jobs rely on it.”

The recent Dieselgate scandal, in which German car manufacturers were caught faking their vehicles' toxic emissions, has barely dented their influence on home ground. When Merkel is in Brussels debating new EU environmental, emission and manufacturing regulations, “she always intervenes” in the car industry’s favour, says Meurer.

“It’s too powerful, it’s too important for our economy.”

Perhaps it’s like the coal industry in the '90s, an industrial relic in decline.

But for now, idealism only goes so far and no further in Green Germany.